Gnostics, Mystic Sects &
Radicals
Russian mystical sects played an extremely
important part in the Bolshevik revolution, on the side of the Bolsheviks. In
spite of their rejection of the state and the church, these sects were deeply
nationalistic, since their members were hostile to foreign innovations. They
hated the West.
— Mikhail Agursky,
The Third Rome
Throughout nineteenth century Europe we find
numerous connections between Gnostics, mystics, occultists and radical
socialists. They constituted what the historian James Webb calls “a
progressive underground” united by a common opposition to the established
order of their day. Constantly, Webb writes, “we find socialists and
occultists running in harness.”2 Sundry spiritual communities
emerged across the United States, with clear Gnostic and occult doctrines, which
attempted to follow a pure communistic life style. Victoria Woodhull, the
president of the American Association of Spiritualists during the 1870s, was a
radical socialist. Woodhull believed that Spiritualism signified not only
religious enlightenment, but also a cultural, political and social revolution.
She published the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto
and tried in vain to persuade Karl Marx that the goals of Spiritualism and
Communism were the same.
Dissident Christian mystics, spiritualists,
occultists and radical socialists often found themselves together at the
forefront of political movements for social justice, worker’s rights, free
love and the emancipation of women. Nineteenth century occultists and socialists
even used the same language in calling for a new age of universal brotherhood,
justice and peace. They all shared a charismatic vision of what the future could
be – a radical alternative to the oppressive old political, social, economic
and religious power structures. And more often than not they found themselves
facing the same common enemy in the unholy alliance of State and Church.
The birth of radical socialist ideas in Russia
cannot be easily separated from the spiritual communism practiced by diverse
Russian sects. For centuries folk myths nourished a widespread belief in the
possibility of an earthly communist paradise united by fraternal love, where
justice, truth and equality prevailed. One prominent Russian legend told of the
lost land of Belovode (the Kingdom of the White Waters), said to be
“across the water” and inhabited by Russian Old Believer mystics. In Belovode,
spiritual life reigned supreme, and all went barefoot sharing the fruits of the
land and their labour. There were no oppressive rules, crime, and war. Another
Russian legend concerned Kitezh, the radiant city beneath the lake. Kitezh
will only rise from the waters and appear again when Russia returns to the
true Christ and is once more worthy to see it and its priceless treasures. Early
in the twentieth century such myths captured the popular imagination and were
associated with the hopes of revolution.
In the latter half of the seventeenth century, a
schism occurred within the Russian Orthodox Church of a new religious movement
called the Old Believers. The result was that many Russian spiritual dissidents
took courage from the split to found their own communities, giving vent to
Gnostic ideas that had long been simmering underground. The Old Believers, in
the face of severe repression, clung tenaciously to their ancient mystic
tradition and expressed their separation from the official world of Imperial
Orthodox Russia in collective migration to the fringes of the state, mass
suicide by fire, rebellion, and a monastic communism.
Gnostic communities, with their communalism and
disdain for private property, proliferated throughout Russia in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. Known by a variety of names such as Common Hope,
United Brotherhood, Love of Brotherhood, Righthanded Brotherhood, White Doves,
Believers in Christ, Friends of God, Wanderers, their followers reportedly
numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Ruthlessly persecuted by the authorities,
they made up a spiritual underground, often hiding themselves from inquisitive
eyes. A countrywide revolutionary sectarianism that rejected the state, the
church, society, law, and even religious commandments, which they declared were
abolished when the Holy Spirit descended to humanity.
The origin of Gnostic ideas in Russia is
difficult to trace, but they appear to be an outgrowth of two powerful spiritual
impulses in Russian religious history. The first is the Christian esoteric
tradition preserved within the monastic communities of the Russian Orthodox
Church. A mystical tradition going back by way of Greek Neoplatonism, Origin and
Clement of Alexandria to St. John the “beloved disciple”. “Russian
Orthodox mystical theology has bent more than a little in the direction of the
Gnostic heresy,” notes the historian Maria Carlson.3 The second
impulse originated with Essene and Manichean missionaries who reached Russia in
the early centuries of the Christian era. An impulse later given new vitality by
the Bogomils whose Gnostic teachings had gained a foothold in Russia by the
thirteenth century.
By the end of the nineteenth century occult and
Gnostic ideas enjoyed wide circulation among all segments of the Russian
population. At one point the Russian philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev (1874-1948)
welcomed the Gnostics, urging “Gnosticism should be revived and should enter
into our life for all time.”4 After the 1917 Revolution,
Gnosticism, observed the Russian scholar Mikhail Agursky, “contributed
considerably to Soviet culture and even influenced Soviet political life. Its
foundations were laid before the revolution…[by] several gnostic trends in
nineteenth century Russian culture.”
While Russian Gnostics rejected the world
order and strove to live by the apostolic precept to hold “all things in
common,”5 they were also profoundly aware of the approaching end
of the age. “Russian popular Gnosticism had a very pronounced apocalyptic
character,” says Mikhail Agursky. “Russian mystical sectarians lived in
anticipation of a catastrophe. The degradation of human life demanded purifying
fire from heaven, which would devour the new Sodom and Gomorrah and replace them
with the Kingdom of God. Any revolution could easily be identified by such
sectarians as this fire, regardless of its external form.”6
Russian Socialism
Bolshevik collectivism had roots in long-standing
Russian values of individual self-sacrifice. The suffering, martyrdom, humility,
and sacrifice of Christ was deeply embedded in the texture of Russian religious
thought and practice, and the lives of Russian saints were a litany of suffering.
The Old Believers, heretics in the eyes of the official church for their
adherence to their own version of the truth, suffered persecution for centuries
at the hands of the government and sought escape in mass immolation,
colonization, and, finally, economic mutual aid.
— Robert C. Williams,
The Other Bolsheviks
Alexander Herzen (1812-1870), seen by many as the
father of Russian socialism, was a friend and admirer of the French
revolutionary Proudhon, who viewed himself as a Christian socialist. Proudhon
worked intermittently all his adult life on a never completed study of the
original teachings of Jesus Christ. Herzen also paid special attention to
Russia’s persecuted religious sectarians. He printed a special supplement for
the Old Believers, the mystic Christian traditionalists who had been driven out
of the Russian Orthodox Church. Nicholas Chernyshevsky, another Russian
socialist thinker of the nineteenth century, wrote an article in praise of the
“fools for Christ’s sake” and defended members of the spiritual
underground.
The Russian radicals of the 1800s, in the words
of James H. Billington, looked upon “socialism as an outgrowth of suppressed
traditions within heretical Christianity.”7 They saw the genesis
of Russian socialism in the spiritual underground of the Gnostics and religious
sectarians. One influential network of Russian socialists openly claimed to be
rediscovering “the teaching of Christ in its original purity,” which “had
as its basic doctrine charity and its aim the realisation of freedom and the
destruction of private property.”8
Nicholas Chernyshevsky (1828-1889), who spent
much of his life in penal servitude, penned the utopian novel What Is To Be
Done? as a vision of the future new society and a guidebook for the
revolutionaries who would build it. Chernyshevsky wrote:
Then say to all: this is what will come to pass
in the future, a radiant and beautiful future. Have love for it, strive toward
it, work on behalf of it, bring it ever nearer, bear what you can from it into
your present life. The more you can carry from that future into your present
life, the more your life will be radiant and good, the richer it will be in
happiness and pleasure.
Chernyshevsky’s novel inspired two generations
of idealistic young radicals. Among them was Alexandre Ulianov, the beloved
elder brother of V.I. Lenin. He was executed in 1887 for his part in the
attempted assassination of Tsar Alexander III. Vladimir Lenin told how
Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done? “captivated my brother, and
captivated me… It transformed me completely.” What impressed the future
leader of the Russian Revolution was how Chernyshevsky:
not only demonstrated the necessity for every
correctly thinking and really honest man to become a revolutionary, but also
showed – even more importantly – what a revolutionary should be like, what
his principles should be, how he must achieve his goals, what methods and
means he should employ to realise them.9
Nicholas Berdyaev observed that the “Russian
revolutionaries who were to be inspired by the ideas of Chernyshevsky present an
interesting psychological problem. The best of Russian revolutionaries
acquiesced during this earthly life in persecution, want, imprisonment, exile,
penal servitude, execution, and they had no hope whatever of another life beyond
this. The comparison with Christians of that time is almost disadvantageous to
the latter; they highly cherished the blessings of this earthly life and counted
upon the blessings of heavenly life.”10
Chernyshevsky, like those who followed
him, was
passionately committed to the power of reason. His philosophy firmly grounded in
the materialist outlook and a sober utilitarianism. But in his life
Chernyshevsky was the embodiment of self-abnegation, single-mindedness and
asceticism. Like a true saint he asked nothing for himself, but wanted
everything for the people as a whole. When the police officers took him into
exile in Siberia they said, “Our orders were to bring a criminal and we are
bringing a saint. “These two elements, the religious and the secular, the
ascetic and the calculating,” writes historian Geoffrey Hosking, “remained
in unresolved tension in his personality, but on the level of theory he sought a
resolution in the idea of a social revolution to be promoted by the best people
on the basis of personal example.”11
Inspired by Chernyshevsky, groups of young
radicals emerged committed to the reconstruction of Russia as a federation of
village communes and communally run factories. The reading list of one such
revolutionary cell is revealing because it included the New Testament and
histories of Russian Gnostic communities. The leader of the main radical circle
in the Russian capital St. Petersburg spoke of founding “a religion of
humanity.” He called his circle “an Order of Knights” and included in its
ranks members of a Gnostic “God-manhood sect” which taught that each
individual is potentially destined to become a god. It was not uncommon for the
revolutionary call “liberty, equality, and fraternity” to be written on
crosses, or for Russian revolutionaries to declare their belief in “Christ, St.
Paul, and Chernyshevsky.”
The Russian socialists frequently visited
religious sectarians and sought their support because of their history of
alienation from the tsarist regime. Emil Dillon, an English journalist who had
personal contact with several persecuted religious communities, reminds us:
Among the various revolutionary agencies which
were at work… the most unpretending, indirect, and effective were certain
religious sectarians…. Coercion in religious matters did more to spread
political disaffection than the most enterprising revolutionary propagandists.
It turned the best spirits of the nation against the tripartite system of God,
Tsar, and fatherland, and convinced even average people not only that there
was no lifegiving principle in the State, but that no faculty of the
individual or the nation had room left for unimpeded growth.12
V.I. Lenin & The Spiritual Underground
Men who are participating in a great social
movement always picture their coming action as a battle in which their cause
is certain to triumph. These constructions… I propose to call myths; the
syndicalist “general strike” and Marx’s catastrophic revolution are such
myths.
— Georges Sorel, 1906
Religious sectarians played a significant part in
the formation of Bolshevism, V.I. Lenin’s unique brand of revolutionary
Marxism. Indeed, Marxism with its aggressive commitment to atheism and
scientific materialism, scorned all religion as “the opium of the people.”
Yet this did not prevent some Bolshevic leaders from utilising concepts taken
directly from occultism and radical Gnosticism. Nor did the obvious materialist
outlook of Communism, as Bolshevism became known, stop Russia’s spiritual
underground from giving valuable patronage to Lenin’s revolutionary cause.
One of Vladimir Lenin’s early supporters was
the radical Russian journalist V. A. Posse, who edited a Marxist journal Zhizn’
(Life) from Geneva. Zhizn’ aimed to enlist the support of Russia’s
burgeoning dissident religious communities in the fight to overthrow the tsarist
autocracy. Posse’s publishing enterprise received the backing of V.D.
Bonch-Bruevich, a Marxist revolutionary and importantly a specialist on Russian
Gnostic sects. Through Bonch-Bruevich’s connections to the spiritual
underground of Old Believers and Gnostics, Posse secured important financial
help for Zhizn’.
The goal of Zhizn’ was to reach a broad
peasant and proletarian audience of readers that would some day constitute a
popular front against the hated Russian government. Lenin soon began
contributing articles to Zhizn’. To Posse, Lenin appeared like some
kind of mystic sectarian, a Gnostic radical, whose asceticism was exceeded only
by his self-confidence. Both Bonch-Bruevich and Posse were impressed by
Lenin’s zeal to build an effective revolutionary party. Lenin disdained
religion and showed little interest in the ‘religious’ orientation of Zhizn’.
The Russian Marxist thinker Plekhanov, one of Lenin’s early mentors, openly
expressed his hostility to the journal’s ‘religious’ bent. He wrote to
Lenin complaining that Zhizn’, “on almost every page talks about
Christ and religion. In public I shall call it an organ of Christian socialism.”
The Zhizn’ publishing enterprise came to
an end in 1902 and its operations were effectively transferred into Lenin’s
hands. This led to the organisation in 1903-1904 of the very first Bolshevic
publishing house by Bonch-Bruevich and Lenin. Both men viewed the Russian
sectarians as valuable revolutionary allies. As one scholar notes, “Russian
religious dissent appealed to Bolshevism even before that movement had acquired
a name.”13
V.D. Bonch-Bruevich (1873-1955) came to
revolutionary Marxism under the influence of the Russian novelist Leo
Tolstoy’s social teachings. Like Lenin’s wife Krupskaya, he started his
revolutionary career distributing Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is within
You, a work infused with neo-Gnostic themes. In 1899 Bonch-Bruevich left
Russia for Canada to live among the Doukhobors, Russian Gnostic communists whose
refusal to pay taxes and serve in the army drove them into exile. Bonch-Bruevich
reported on the secret doctrines of the Doukhobors and put in writing their
fundamental oral teachings known as the ‘Living Book’. On his return to
Europe in 1901 Bonch-Bruevich introduced Lenin to the chief tenets of these
Gnostic communists. The Doukhobors, with their radical rejection of the Church
and State, with their denial of the uniqueness of the historical Christ, and
their neglect of the Bible in favour of their own secret tradition, were of some
interest to the founder of Bolshevism.
In 1904
Bonch-Bruevich, with Lenin’s support,
began publishing Rassvet (Dawn) in an effort to spread revolutionary
Marxism among the religious dissidents. His first editorial attacked all the
Russian tsars for their persecution of the Old Believers and sectarians, and
stated that the journal’s goal was to report events occurring world wide,
“in various corners of our vast motherland, and among the ranks of Sectarians
and Schismatics.” Rassvet combined Communist and apocalyptic themes
that were both compelling and comprehensible to Russia’s spiritual underground.
By the early years of the twentieth century
Russia was in a revolutionary mood. Bonch-Bruevich wrote that this would soon
produce a “street battle of the awakened people.” He urged his fellow
Communist revolutionaries to use the language of the spiritual underground in
persuading the masses that the government was “Satan” and that “all men
are brothers” in the eyes of God. He wrote:
If the proletariat-sectarian in his speech
requires the word ‘devil’, then identify this old concept of an evil
principle with capitalism, and identify the word ‘Christ’, as a concept of
eternal good, happiness, and freedom, with socialism.
Communist God-Builders & The Occult
If a newcomer to the vast quantity of occult
literature begins browsing at random, puzzlement and impatience will soon be his
lot; for he will find jumbled together the droppings of all cultures, and
occasional fragments of philosophy perhaps profound but almost certainly
subversive to right living in the society in which he finds himself. The occult
is rejected knowledge: that is, an Underground whose basic unity is that of
Opposition to an establishment of Powers That Are.
— James Webb,
Occult Underground
A Marxist pamphlet written before 1917 and later
reissued by the Soviet government bluntly declared that man is destined to
“take possession of the universe and extend his species into distant cosmic
regions, taking over the whole solar system. Human beings will be immortal.”
Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Commissar of Enlightenment in the new Soviet
state, believed that as religious conviction had been a great force of change in
history, Marxists should conceive the struggle to transform nature through labor
as their form of devotion, and the spirit of collective humanity as their god.
A.V. Lunacharsky (1875-1933) and the Russian
writer Maxim Gorky (1868-1936), close friends of Vladimir Lenin, were acquainted
with a broad spectrum of occult thought, including Rudolf Steiner’s
Anthroposophy and Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophy. Both these prominent Bolshevic
revolutionaries shared a life-long interest in ancient mystery cults, religious
sectarianism, parapsychology and Gnosticism. Maria Carlson maintains that
Gorky’s “vision of a New Nature and a New World, subsequently assimilated to
its socialist expression as the Radiant Future, is fundamentally Theosophic.”14
Gorky valued the writings of the occultists Emanuel Swedenborg and Paracelsus,
as well as those of Fabre d’Olivet and Eduard Schure.
Drawing on the imagery of the ancient solar
mysteries, Gorky declared in Children of the Sun, “we people are the
children of the sun, the bright source of life; we are born of the sun and will
vanquish the murky fear of death.” In his Confession, the “people”
have become God, creators of miracles, possessors of true religious
consciousness, and immortal. Gorky envisioned a beautiful future of work for the
love of work and of man as “master of all things.” Revealing his familiarity
with parapsychology and faith healing, Gorky tells how an assembled crowd uses
its collective energy to heal a paralysed girl. He was deeply impressed by
research into thought transference, often writing of the “miraculous power of
thought”, while expressing the hope that one day reason and science would end
fear.
The ideas advanced by Lunacharsky and Gorky
became known as God building, described by one researcher as a “movement of
secular rejuvenation with mystery cult aspects.”15 God building
implied that a human collective, through the concentration of released human
energy, can perform the same miracles that were assigned to supra-natural beings.
God builders regarded early Christianity as an authentic example of collective
God building, Christ being nothing other than the focus of collective human
energy. “The time will come,” said Gorky, “when all popular will shall
once again amalgamate in one point. Then an invincible and miraculous power will
emerge, and God will be resurrected.”16
Years before, Fyodor
Dostoyevsky had written in The Possessed, “God is the synthetic
personality of the whole people.” According to Mikhail Agursky:
For Gorky, God-building was first of all a
theurgical action, the creation of the new Nature and the annihilation of the
old, and therefore it coincided fully with the Kingdom of the Spirit. He
considered God to be a theurgical outcome of a collective work, the outcome of
human unity and of the negation of the human ego.17
Before the Russian Revolution, Lunacharsky’s
political propaganda relied heavily on words and images ultimately derived from
Russian Gnostics and religious sectarians. In one pamphlet he urged readers to
refuse to pay taxes or serve in the army, to form local revolutionary
committees,
to demand ownership of their land, overthrow the autocracy and replace it with a
“brotherly society” of socialism. Indeed, there was as much attention given
to Christ as to Marx in Lunacharsky’s writings. “Christianity, in all its
forms, even the purest and most progressive,” he wrote, “is the ideology of
the downtrodden classes, the hopelessly immobile, those who cannot believe in
their own powers; Christianity is also a weapon of exploitation.” But
Lunacharsky realised there is also an underground spiritual tradition, the
arcane language and symbols of which might be used to mobilise the people to
carry out the revolution.
Occult elements are obvious in Lunacharsky’s
early plays and poems, including a reference to the “astral spirit”, and a
familiarity with white magic and demonology. He discussed Gnosticism, the Logos,
Pythagoras, and solar cults in his two volume work Religion and Socialism.
After the Bolshevic Revolution, Lunacharsky wrote an occult play called Vasilisa
the Wise. This was to be followed by a never published “dramatic poem”
entitled Mitra the Saviour, a clear reference to the pre-Christian occult
deity. Significantly, it is Lunacharsky, along with the scholar of Russian
Gnostic sects V.D. Bonch-Bruevich, who is credited with developing the so-called
“cult of Lenin” which dominated Soviet life following the Bolshevic
leaders’
death in 1924.
Soviet Power & Spiritual Revolution
A Weltanschauung has conquered a state,
and emanating from this state it will slowly shatter the entire world and bring
about its collapse. Bolshevism, if unchecked, will change the world as
completely as Christianity did. Three hundred years from now it will no longer
be said that it is merely a question of organising production in a different way…
If this movement continues to develop, Lenin, three hundred years from now, will
be regarded not only as one of the revolutionaries of 1917, but as the founder
of a new world doctrine, and he will be worshipped as much perhaps as Buddha.
— Adolf Hitler, 193218
In the wake of the total collapse of Imperial
Russia and the devastation caused by the First World War, Lenin and the
Bolshevics seized power in October 1917. A revolution that would not have been
possible without the active support and participation of the Russian spiritual
underground. The Bolshevics, in the opinion of one Russian scholar:
most probably would not have been able to take
power or to consolidate it if the multimillion masses of Russian sectarians
had not taken part in the total destruction brought about by the revolution,
which acquired a mystical character for them. To them the state and the church
were receptacles of all kinds of evil, and their destruction and debasement
were regarded as a mystic duty, exactly as it was with the [medieval Gnostic
sects of] Anabaptists, Bogomils, Cathars, and Taborites.19
Ground down by centuries of autocratic tsarist
rule as well as the Orthodox Church, its mere appendage, the Russian people came
to accept the Communism of Lenin. “Bolshevism is a Russian word,” wrote an
anti-Communist Russian in 1919. “But not only a word. Because in that guise,
in that form and in those manifestations which have crystallized in Russia…
Bolshevism is a uniquely Russian phenomenon, with deep ties to the Russian soul.”20
Even the Nazi propaganda minister Dr. Goebbels, who built his political career
fighting Communism, confessed that no tsar had ever understood the Russian
people as deeply as Lenin, who gave them what they wanted most – land and
freedom.
Lenin wedded the dialectical materialism of Marx
to the deep-rooted tradition of Russian socialism permeated as it was by Gnostic,
apocalyptic, and messianic elements. In the same manner he reconciled the
Marxist commitment to science, atheism and technological progress with the
Russian ideas of justice, truth and self-sacrifice for the collective. Similarly
the leader of Bolshevism merged the Marxist call for proletarian
internationalism and world revolution with the centuries old notion of
Russia’s great mission as the harbinger of universal brotherhood. Violently
opposed to all religion, atheistic Bolshevism drew much from the spiritual
underground, becoming in the words of one of Lenin’s comrades, “the most
religious of all religions.”
“Nonetheless we have studied Marxism a bit,”
wrote Lenin, “we have studied how and when opposites can and must be combined.
The main thing is: in our revolution… we have in practice repeatedly combined
opposites.” Several centuries earlier the Muslim Gnostic teacher Jalalladin
Rumi pointed out, “It is necessary to note that opposite things work together
even though nominally opposed.”
After the 1917 Bolshevic Revolution:
occultism was part of a cluster of ideas that
inspired a mystical revolutionism based on the belief that great earthly
events such as revolution reflect a realignment of cosmic forces. Revolution,
then, had eschatological significance. Its result would be a ‘new heaven and
a new earth’ peopled by a new kind of human being and characterized by a new
kind of society cemented by love, common ideals, and sacrifice.
The Bolshevic Revolution did not quash interest
in the occult. Some pre-revolutionary occult ideas and symbols were
transformed along more ‘scientific’ lines. Mingled with compatible
concepts, they permeated early Soviet art, literature, thought, and science.
Soviet political activists who did not believe in the occult used symbols,
themes, and techniques drawn from it for agitation and propaganda. Further
transformed, some of them were incorporated in the official culture of
Stalin’s time.21
Apocalyptic and mess-ianic themes, popularised
for centuries by the Russian spiritual underground, were played out in the
Bolshevic Revolution and fueled the drive to build a classless, communist
society. The dream of a communist paradise on earth created by human hands, a
new world adorned by technological perfection, social justice and brotherhood,
was found both in Marx and in the Russian spiritual underground.
Lenin promulgated a law exempting religious
sectarians from military service. Writers and poets, drawing inspiration from
the Russian religious underground, hailed the Revolution as a messianic, world
mystery. One writer compared the Bolshevic Revolution with the origin of
Christianity. “Christ was followed,” he exclaimed, “not by professors, nor
by virtuous philosophers, nor by shopkeepers. Christ was followed by rascals.
And the revolution will also be followed by rascals, apart from those who
launched it. And one must not be afraid of this.”
Alexander Blok (1880-1921) was the most important
Russian poet to recognise the Bolshevics. A student of Gnosticism, Blok
discerned the inner meaning of the tumultuous political and social events. There
was a hidden spiritual content at the core of the external upheavals of the
Revolution and the bloody Civil War that followed. Blok clearly expressed this
in his famous poem The Twelve, where the invisible Christ leads the
revolutionary march.
Another Russian poet and occultist, Andrei Bely,
a disciple of Steiner’s Anthroposophical movement, hailed the Revolution as
the first stage of a far greater cultural and spiritual revolution to come. For
Bely, as for his contemporary Blok, the Bolshevic Revolution was above all a
powerful theurgical instrument. Andrei Bely (1880-1934) saw theurgy as a means
to change the world actively in collaboration with God. In spite of the turmoil
and bloodshed, for these Russian occultists the revolution served as an
instrument of the new creation. Bely celebrated the 1917 Revolution in a poem, Christ
is Resurrected, in which the Bolshevic take over is compared with the
mystery of Crucifixion and Resurrection. Rudolf Steiner understood why the
Russians welcomed the October Revolution, but criticised Bolshevism as a
dangerous mix of Western abstract thinking and Eastern mysticism.
The Russian spiritual underground spawned several
important writers and poets who welcomed the Bolshevic Revolution. Two of the
most outstanding were Nikolai Kliuev (1887-1937) and Sergei Esenin (1895-1925).
Occult images and Russian messianic themes abound in their poems. Kliuev saw
Lenin as the popular leader and embodiment of the Old Belief. In typically
Gnostic fashion Esenin disdained the old God of the Church and proclaimed a
“new Nazareth”. The young Esenin gave support to the Bolshevic Red Army and
even tried to join the Bolshevic party. Tragically, Kliuev felt betrayed by the
Revolution, was arrested and died on the way to a labor camp in 1937. Esenin
took his own life in 1925 believing dark forces had usurped the Russian
Revolution.
By the early 1920s the Bolshevics had
consolidated their hold over much of the former Russian Empire. The Communist
Party emerged as the monolithic embodiment of the popular will. All occult
societies, including the Theosophists and Anthroposophists, were disbanded.
Freemasonry was virulently condemned and its lodges closed. In the drive to
modernise Russia and build a technologically advanced Soviet Union, occult
notions were publicly classed as superstition and openly ridiculed. The new
Soviet State, with its Marxist-Leninist ideology, became the sole arbitrator of
all thought. Leading occult teachers were forced into exile. Yet many of those
associated with the spiritual underground joined the Communist Party and found
employment in various Soviet organisations.
The sway of the spiritual underground did not
disappear. Arcane truths and primordial urges took on new forms in keeping with
the new reality. Esoteric ideas were clothed in the language of a new epoch. One
writer explains:
In Stalin’s time, occult themes and
techniques detached from their doctrinal base became part of the official
culture…. The occult themes of Soviet literature of the 1920s were
transformed into the magical or fantastic elements that observers have noted
in Socialist Realism. Stalin himself was invested with occult powers.22
The Russian thinker, Isai Lezhnev (1891-1955),
insisted on the profoundly religious character of Communism, which was “equal
to atheism only in a narrow theological sense.” Emotionally, psychologically,
Bolshevism was extremely religious, seeing itself as the only custodian of
absolute truth. Lezhnev correctly discerned in Bolshevism the rise of a “new
religion” which brought with it a new culture and political order. He embraced
Marxism-Leninism and welcomed Stalin as a manifestation of the “popular spirit”.
The Russian Revolution, which gave rise to the
super power known as the Soviet Union, cast a gigantic shadow over the twentieth
century. Bolshevism, the materialistic worldview developed by Vladimir Lenin,
left its mark on all aspects of modern thought. And the roots of Lenin’s
Communism and the Soviet Union go deep into the ancient secret tradition of
humanity.
Was atheistic Bolshevism, for all its worship of
science and materialism, the expression of something supra-natural? Many in the
spiritual underground passionately believed so. The Gnostic poet Valery Briusov
(1873-1924), who joined the Bolshevic party in 1920, had been involved in magick,
occultism and spiritualism prior to the revolution. Briusov stressed that
Russia’s destiny was being worked out, not on earth, but by mystic forces for
which the 1917 Revolution was part of the occult plot.
Another prominent Russian occultist, the
acclaimed artist Nicholas Roerich, acknowledged Lenin and Communism as cosmic
phenomenon. In 1926 he wrote:
He [Lenin] incorporated and circumspectly
fitted every material into the world order. This opened up for him the path
into all parts of the world. And people have formed a legend not only as a
record of his deeds but also as a mark of his aspirations…. We have seen for
ourselves how the nations have understood the magnetic power of communism.
Friends, the worst counsellor is negativity. Behind every negation ignorance
is concealed.
The philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev, a former
Marxist who came to embrace Christian mysticism, was exiled from the Soviet
Union in the 1920s. He had studied occultism and was acquainted with many
Russian Gnostic sects. His 1909 book The Philosophy of Freedom is full of
Gnostic themes. And like the Gnostics, Berdyaev opposed the institution of the
family as yoking men and women to “necessity” and the endless chain of birth
and death. Writing from exile, more than twenty-five years after the Revolution,
Berdyaev observed:
Russian communism is a distortion of the
Russian messianic idea; it proclaims light from the East which is destined to
enlighten the bourgeois darkness of the West. There is in communism its own
truth and its own falsehood. Its truth is a social truth, a revelation of the
possibility of the brotherhood of man and of peoples, the suppression of
classes, whereas its falsehood lies in its spiritual foundations which result
in a process of dehumanisation, in the denial of the worth of the individual
man, in the narrowing of human thought…. Communism is a Russian phenomenon
in spite of its Marxist ideology. Communism is the Russian destiny, it is a
moment in the inner destiny of the Russian people and it must be lived through
by the inward strength of the Russian people. Communism must be surmounted but
not destroyed, and into the highest stage which will come after communism
there must enter the truth of communism also but freed from its element of
falsehood. The Russian Revolution awakened and unfettered the enormous powers
of the Russian people. In this lies its principle meaning.23
| The Hammer and
Sickle: Occult Symbols?
 Throughout the twentieth century the hammer and
sickle were universally recognised as symbols of communism and the Soviet Union.
For millions of people the hammer and sickle symbolised a new political and
economic order offering progress, justice and liberty. While countless others
looked on the same hammer and sickle as ominous emblems of oppression, hatred
and tyranny.
Occultists and students of ancient wisdom saw
something more. Behind the outward appearance of these communist emblems, which
officially represented the emancipation of labor, there was an element unknown
to the masses.
Russian occultists saw the Bolshevics as
unconsciously working for the cosmic mission of Russia and interpreted the
Soviet hammer and sickle as hidden symbols of the blacksmith’s art, hinting at
future transmutation and transformation. Both metallurgy and alchemy (regarded
as an occult science) sort to destroy impure elements with fire and thereby
release a refined product, whether forged metal (the smith) or spiritual gold (the
alchemist). Fire is associated with transfiguration, regeneration, and
purification, while iron is associated with Mars (the god of war) and the astral
world.
To the occultist, the communist hammer and sickle
symbolised conflict and transmutation. The forging – in the fires of struggle
– of base elements into a purer, higher form. The atheistic Bolshevic, like
the occultist, proclaimed that ordinary man must be transformed into new man,
free of the bonds of selfish desires and of the oppressive past, in order to
freely build the new civilisation of the future.
|
Footnotes:
1. Benjamin Walker, Gnosticism Its History
& Influence
2. James Webb, Occult Underground
3. Maria Carlson, No Religion Higher Than
Truth
4. As quoted in Maria Carlson, No Religion
Higher Than Truth
5. Acts 2:44-47
6. Mikhail Agursky, The Third Rome
7. James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe
8. As quoted in James H. Billington, The Icon
and the Axe
9. As quoted in Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives:
The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia
10. Nicholas Berdyaev, The Russian Idea
11. Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and
Empire
12. As quoted in Mikhail Agursky, The Third
Rome
13. Robert C. Williams, The Other Bolsheviks
14. Maria Carlson, No Religion Higher Than
Truth
15. Richard Noll, The Jung Cult
16. Mikhail Agursky, The Third Rome
17. The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture,
edited by Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal
18. As quoted in Hitler’s Words, edited
by Gordon Prange
19. Mikhail Agursky, The Third Rome
20. As quoted in Richard Pipes, Russia Under
the Bolshevik Regime 1919-1924
21. The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture,
edited by Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal
22. Ibid
23. Nicholas Berdyaev, The Russian Idea
